Saturday, June 03, 2017

So, the 20th anniversary of OK Computer approaches, with the inevitable special edition reissue and all that entails. Thom Yorke has grumbled about the backward-looking nature of the whole Britpop phenomenon that dominated the cultural scene while he was recording the album but, as others have pointed out, it’s a bit rich to sneer at nostalgia when you’re celebrating the birthday of your own product.

To be fair, Yorke was actually attempting to do something a bit different with his third album, even if the Pink Floyd and JG Ballard references loomed large. But if he really does object to nostalgia so much, he’d better put his head under a pillow for the rest of the year. There’s the whole Sgt Pepper phenomenon, of course, which is a veritable babushka of nostalgias, packing any number of Victorian and Edwardian references in among the hallucinogens and Mellotrons. I heard David Rodigan lauding Bob Marley’s Exodus last night and, also from 1977, we can expect any amount of old punks getting wistful as Never Mind the Bollocks gets the same treatment later in the year.

Now I’m nearly 50, a proper old fart, so all this stuff is squarely aimed at me; but what about the young folk for whom even Britpop is just a wispy rumour, something their parents did in the old days before Snapchat? To get an approximate idea, I picked up a copy of NME, a publication that probably stopped trying to tickle my own cultural tummy around the turn of the millennium. The first thing I saw was a wraparound cover promoting movie iterations of Baywatch (a TV show first shown in 1989) and Transformers (a toy line launched in North America in 1984). But the real front page doesn’t say much more about 2017; a moody shot of Liam Gallagher, a man in his mid-40s who had his first hit records 23 years ago. Moreover, the whole design of the cover, with Gallagher in a parka and a jaunty target logo hovering by his grumpy head, seems to be echoing the Mod revival of the late 70s/early 80s, which was in turn a nod to the social and musical eruptions of the early 60s, before even Sgt Pepper hit the racks.

So, has it all ended? Have we really drained the cultural well, so we can only sustain ourselves with echoes of echoes of echoes? Or, in the midst of all these old men looking backwards, is something going to pop up and surprise us all? Can’t see it myself...

PS: To contextualize the idea of Liam etc on the cover, it’s as if, when I first read the NME in about 1984, its exterior was adorned with Adam Faith, and films based on Dixon of Dock Green and Play-Doh.

what am I like?

Author of books about Radiohead, Leonard Cohen and The Noughties, plus various odds and sods for The Guardian, Mojo, Time Out, Prospect, BBC, CNN and more. Finally doing an MA. You can reach me at timfootman (AT) gmail.com or follow me on Twitter or Instagram.

good taste is better than bad taste, but bad taste is better than no taste

So what’s all this Cultural Snow business, then?

“The writing itself is no big thing. I mean I like writing. It’s even relaxing for me. But the content is a real zero. Pointless in fact.”“What do you mean?”“I mean, for instance, you do the rounds of fifteen restaurants in one day, you eat one bite of each dish and leave the rest untouched. You think that makes sense?”“But you couldn’t very well eat everything, could you?”“Of course not. I’d drop dead in three days if I did. And everyone would think I was an idiot. I’d get no sympathy whatsoever.”“So what choice have you got?” she said.“I don't know. The way I see it, it’s like shoveling snow. You do it because somebody’s got to, not because it's fun.”“Shoveling snow, huh?” she mused.“Well, you know, cultural snow,” I said.—from Dance Dance Dance, by Haruki Murakami (translated by Alfred Birnbaum)